Wednesday, 30 March 2016

Goosebumps Monster Bags
baby! A real favourite of mine from 1996 and (I believe) Hasbro, everything
about these were great. They worked the exact same way as Galoob’s 1991 flash
of brilliance Trash Bag Bunch, I was originally going to make a snarky comment
about this not being too surprising because Hasbro own Galoob but it turns out they didn’t buy that company until 1998
so instead of recycling an idea, they just nicked it instead. If you don’t
recall Trash Bag Bunch, or are just too young or too sexy to know/care about
them they were the best way of handling the blind bag concept possible – the
figures came in rubbish bags full of slime that dissolved in water. Monster
Bags are just that but even better – because they’re action figures, and
Goosebumps.

I was all in on the
Goosebumps fad in the mid-90s, if any imaginary readers remember my Two TMNTSweeties post you’ll

know that I still own a stack of the books and am so
shameless about my past with them that I proudly have them on my bookshelves as
an adult, but I had Goosebumps everything – stationary, pyjamas, clothes,
posters, board games, I had Goosebumps slippers and I didn’t wear slippers
(putting Goosebumps in the elite Pointless Slippers Club with only Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sonic the Hedgehog for company) – so any Goosebumps
action figures, my preferred medium of toys as you may have guessed, was the
height of awesome; but ones that came in dissolvable bags of goo? What’s higher
than the height of awesome? The Rock of Eternity? Whatever it is, Monster Bags
were there for 9 year old me. My mum not so much, she never liked any of these
dissolvable things and as I found out in the toy isle of Tesco the other day,
she’s still not keen.

The figures weren’t blind
bagged, but rather each soft fabric bag (the best way to describe a Monster Bag
is, you know when paper gets really used and becomes almost like cloth? They
feel like that) came on a somewhat superfluous blister card clearly detailing
which one of the four characters came inside along with instructions on the
back, each card also included a small plastic knife to rip

open the bags with
once you’d soaked it. The bright green bags (most Goosebumps things were either
purple or hot green, if you recall) contained equally neon slime with a
slightly crystalline/gritty feel to them that had to be submerged in warm
water. Whatever this shit was it was clearly supplied by a Sly Sludge, I think
you can see it in my pictures but just in case – my Slappy and Mr Mortman STILL
have green stains in their nooks and crannies after 20 fucking years. I think the intention was that you ‘cut’ (read:
ripped) the bags open on a nearby flat surface but my nan would never have gone
for that, this is the woman who put a sheet down on the garden patio when I used Real Ghostbusters Ecto-Plasm, so I
opened mine in the water and thus can tell you exactly what that sludge felt
like because too this day I can feel it every time I wash up or am forced to
drink a J2O– gritty thick water, like everything liquid or
semi-liquid from Dr Dreadful but grittier. What you were left with was not a
figure, but parts to be assembled, yes – just to make these things even cooler,
you could swap all their parts though personally I never did this (I didn’t do
it with He-Man either, hell I didn’t do it with Socket Poppers and that was the
whole point of them, I just like my figures to look accurate, I was such an
anal child). Once you’d done all this you were left with one of four figures
from the Goosebumps novels. I’m sure at least one imaginary reader is thinking
‘what an unnecessary load of extra crap to do to get a figure’ but I couldn’t
disagree more, the extra effort made me appreciate them more and they remain so
memorable because of their gross method of unpacking - and bags of slime
improve any toy for kids.

Sunday, 27 March 2016

Greetings, it is I: Plundor
the Spoiler, ravager of the spaceways and conqueror of Draedus, well I was
until that He-person turned up, silly brute, how can one not be interested in
money? Ah ha ha ha.

I am told that on your
insignificant little planet around this time you like to celebrate death with
rabbits, and as the biggest, evilest, pinkest bunny around this is, well, right
up my alley. So I have observed your puny world and it’s amusing little
distraction ‘the internet’ and plucked from it the finest five long eared
ladies you should worship far more than you already do.

Saturday, 26 March 2016

I thought for sure there
would be some entertainment value in a £1.66 complete set of Space Jam trading
cards. I was wrong. Of course I’m still going to wring out a blog post out of
it for my new ill-fated idea: Trading Card Theatre.

Firstly though, like the
Gen13 set I bought from the same seller, these aren’t a completely complete
set, they don’t have the special Animotion insert/chase cards and that sucks,
because little lenticular images of scenes from Space Jam sounds awesome, but
as they sell for $12 each I can maybe see why the couple didn’t put them in their
3 for a fiver box of shitty trading cards under their table. Secondly these
cards came out before the film, as
well as being a bit presumptuous it severely limits what the card set can
include, my favourite type of trading cards for films are the ones that had the whole film in screen grabs so I can
read along with the set, hell the Little Shop of Horrors set had more of the
film than the film by including cut scenes. Instead this is what we got:

Saturday, 19 March 2016

I don’t think this is going
to be a regular feature, but I bought a bunch of trading card sets at a
convention and I’m pretty sure I can get blog posts out of all of ‘em and by
damn I’m not wasting that opportunity for content.

First up is Gen 13 ’96, the
second series of Gen 13 trading cards Wildstorm put out that cost me roughly
£1.66, so I shouldn’t complain too much that the set didn’t include the alloy
chase cards but I will mention that it didn’t so you know why I left them out.
Gen 13 Volume 2 was easily one of my favourite books of the ‘90s and remains
something I re-read fairly often, it wasn’t clever, it wasn’t deep, it wasn’t
dark and gritty, it didn’t deconstruct anything, it was just filled with
likeable characters in enjoyable stories with work from a bunch of creators I
liked – people like J. Scott Campbell, Jim Lee, Gary Frank and Adam Warren –
though it did have work by Ed Benes but y’know, nobody’s perfect. For this set
I’m just going to pick out noteworthy cards I think are worth talking about or
showing to the internet, the way I figure it even if nobody cares about my
opinions on trading cards from 20 years ago at least this’ll include some
rarely seen art by some recognisable names in the industry, after all, I bet
you didn’t know Kelly Jones drew a Gen13 picture.

Monday, 14 March 2016

I don’t trust Pintrest. It’s
not that I think the site itself is unreliable it’s simply that I don’t trust
it to last forever, or at least for my lifespan – I’m old enough to remember MySpace,
MSN Messenger, Kazaa & AOL Chat and I see no reason to believe that the likes
of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and yes Pintrest won’t end up the same way so I still
do things the old fashioned way – I save any pictures I want to my hard-drive
and then back them up on an external hard-drive, I may be a dinosaur, but I’m a
dinosaur that’s not going to lose access to this selection of April O’Neil
fanart any time soon. My biggest folder, and the one that requires the most maintenance
just to allow it to function properly, is not the hentai folder but one simply
called ‘Reference’. It’s pretty self-explanatory
and is mostly stuffed with photos of rare toys, concept art, card backs and scans
of wrappers and fliers. This leads us to today’s time waster my imaginary chums,
as I’m just sorting through some pictures to put in that folder now, now a lot
of the images I can’t repost with a clean conscience because they belong to
fellow bloggers or forum posters, but the eBay stuff? That I have no guilt
about - especially the guy charging £350 for old masks - so are you sitting
comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Boglins Masks!

Well these are fucking
terrifying (and terrifyingly expensive too) now a regular Boglin is hand sized –
what do we reckon, 10 inches at the biggest? These things are head sized and
look like carnies from the most unnerving circus ever to travel the backgrounds
of America where your car just had to break down and of course they’re the only
thing around and of course they turn out to… *ehem* my point is that they’re
bigger than regular Boglins and freakier than regular Boglins but weirdly they’re
a whole regular Boglin – they have arms and a tail - so they’re not so much dressing
you up as a Boglin as they are making it look like you’ve got a Boglin Headcrab,
very strange.

Cadbury’s Little Horrors!

I totally had these! In fact
there’s a plastic crate in my shed with Tipp and Snipz still on them! I picked
these for this article just so I could tell you that. These glow in the dark
stickers were given away by Cadbury’s, the chocolate company, in the early
1990s and 8 different sheets were made (I have a picture of the complete set
but it’s small and I don’t remember where I stole it from) but I honestly can’t
remember the exact method of distribution and because they’re not American I can’t
find anything on the interwebs about them, I’m pretty sure they were packed in
with something but they seem a little large for a standard chocolate bar. If any
Imaginary Reader out there knows more, do tell me please.

Dragon Return!

Either you’ll understand the
appeal of this or you won’t because all I got for ya is “look it’s a little
clockwork Bruce Lee with an Engrish name, it’s so crap it’s amazing!”. I was
actually considering buying this, I’m not a very big Bruce Lee, in fact I think
I’d say that I’m not fan of Bruce Lee
but I am a fan of these dumpy little ‘walkers’ and a fan of crappy bootleg toys
and the more inexplicable and wrong the more I like ‘em and making a cute
little knock-off toy of a dead man may well be the pinnacle of knock-off
toy wrongness, well that or that Batman squirt gun where you fill him up via
his butt and push his penis.

Jem Costume and Mask!

I finally found a Ben
Cooper costume that I’d actually buy. Collecting these shitty old Halloween costumes
by Ben Cooper and Collegeville and their ilk is apparently a thing, it’s a nostalgia
thing I think as these things were everywhere in 1970s and early ‘80s America,
all pretty much consisting of a mask, and a plastic smock with a picture of the
character on it, not the most convincing costume but weirdly charming (you
should see their Jaws one, or their Village People one!). As whacky as they are
I can’t say I’ve ever found one that made me go ‘I really want that’ until this
one turned up on a Google Image search for something completely unrelated, my
love of Jem & The Holograms is strong and if anything could convince me to overcome
the issues inherent in the concept of a grown man buying a little girl’s
plastic outfit it’s a Jem mask that looks strangely like Elizabeth Taylor.

Monster Paper Dolls!

I’m still toying with the
idea of buying one of these but I really doubt I’m creating a demand for them,
even though you should want one. Despite looking like a modern ‘ironic’ novelty
gift it apparently came out in 1983 and frankly I just want it for all the
various ways you can make The Bride of Frankenstein look sexy, as funny as
Dracula’s saggy old man body and The Monster’s sock suspenders are, obviously. But
I just can’t bring myself to pay £15 for what amounts to a large picture of an undead
woman in her undies even if it’s this
undead woman in those undies, if I do
I promise to scan and upload the Bride in all her outfits, because I’m sure you’re
all as sexually obsessed with her as I am.

Trouble Troll!

Unlike everything else on
this list, this one I’m including for a serious reason. Troll Fighters are a
rare bootleg line from Simba that had the genius to mix He-Man, Madballs and
Norfin Trolls into one beautiful mess. These turn up so rarely that even
pictures of them are hard to find, this is the first one of Trouble Troll I’ve
seen (other than the one on the backs of the blister cards) though he’s missing
his armour (you could easily nick one from the more common Galaxy Warriors: End
of Time, TT’s is blue) I just felt that this image should be preserved and kept
online for other bootleg action figure enthusiasts, and so I feel like I’m part
of things as I am hopelessly priced out of getting these (though I have a nice
few from Troll Force, yes there were two He-Man/Norfin Troll mash-up knock-off lines).

Evil X-Ray Wretch Armstrong!

Oooh yeah. The 90’s Stretch
Armstrong line doesn’t get enough praise, I think it’s because they turned
Stretch Armstrong into a grinning Steve Irwin and I can understand that, the 90’s
Stretch himself does not command the respect of his 70’s predecessor but he had
some wicked baddies. Vac-Man is the one who gets all the attention but my
personal favourite was Wretch Armstrong, the Bizarro to Stretch Armstrong’s
Superman the character was really just an updating and expanding of the old
Stretch X-Ray for the 1990’s neon plastic and gross out toy generation of
playthings. They gave him light up guts and, because it was the 1990s, a neon
orange gun with a hook, missile and chainsaw on it and attached it to a head like
a punk rock cenobyte, I can’t see why any boy wouldn’t want to play with this. I
totally had a Wretch Armstrong, but I really couldn’t figure out how to look
after these toys and they all either broke or went hard (or in the Vac Pac’s
cases, turned into Beanie Babies) I regret this but as a child I just couldn’t figure
out why I couldn’t treat them like ordinary action figures.

Don’t worry I’m done now, I
can’t think of a suitable concluding paragraph other than the advice that if
you’re looking for a picture of something and that something is an odd old toy,
put ‘eBay’ after the name and you chances of finding it will be a lot better (and
you might find it in higher resolution too) and then you too can write nothing
posts like these for your blogs, won’t that be fun for all?

Friday, 11 March 2016

This week’s bout of
depression has created an unusual side effect in a huge wave of nostalgia for Universal
Studios and the realisation “of course it’s all on YouTube”, the internet has
given us many bounties – most of them involving naked people, yes - but being
able to experience old theme park attractions you thought you’d never experience
again, exactly how you remember (or close enough) is one of it’s tastiest. I’m
returning to Florida this year and I’ll of course be returning to Harry Potterland featuring The Simpsons Universal
Studios, and I will damn well enjoy it, but the Universal Studios on my
childhood is no more, Kong, Jaws, Mr Stay Puft, Doc & Marty and now
Beetlejuice and the Universal Monsters have been shuffled off for undeniable
cash cows like The Simpsons, Harry Potter and Minions and things that can never
hope to have the longevity of these or the things they’ve replaced like Shrek, The
Mummy remake and the Bayformers, and I say that as a confirmed fan of the Mummy
remake and someone you better believe is going on all of those properties’
rides. But thanks to YouTube and a site for downloading videos from it that I do
not know exists, at all, I am now totally ok with this; because I can experience
the Kong ride any time I want - without the taste of American Tourist Sweat™.

Sunday, 6 March 2016

I kept meaning to do a
Pogues or Billy Bragg one of these to tie into the Kirsty MacColl one but I left
it too late so bollocks, let’s have some direction, some reaction and some
creation.

Welcome to my second
instalment of Ten Other Great Songs By… where I gush about the songs you’ve
never heard of by bands you don’t know the name of but would recognise if you
heard them, eschewing the one or two hits the act has to tell you about 10
other great songs they recorded. This format was designed for the likes of Ian
Dury, Kirsty MacColl and Billy Bragg, who only had a couple of hits and a
couple of ‘Teenage Kicks’, signature songs that weren’t chart successes at the
time (and haven’t been since) but are now very well known, sometimes more than
their actual hits (i.e. Teenage Kicks by the Undertones, which is far better
known in the UK than their actual bit hit My Perfect Cousin). It wasn’t meant
for bands like The Jam.

Though their popularity
never translated across the Atlantic because the band didn’t really like
America all that much when they first toured (mostly, and I’m not kidding, it
was the higher drinking age, all of them were under 21 at the time!) The Jam
are considered one of the great British Bands, often held in higher esteem than
many of their major influences (The Kinks, The Who…) due to putting out music
for only five albums and six years and staying
broken up. A three-piece consisting of drummer Rick Butler, bassist and
occasional songwriter Bruce Foxton and lead vocalist, lead guitarist, principal
songwriter, style icon and god among men Paul Weller, the bastards had a
whopping 13 top 20 singles and they only released 19, with only one single overall ending up outside
the UK Top 30 and that song, ‘The Modern World’, easily qualified as a Teenage
Kick thanks to its strong ties to the ’77 British Punk movement and thus
appearing on lots and lots of Punk compilations. Though you could probably
whittle down their ‘big songs’ to number 1 hits ‘Going Underground’, ‘Town
Called Malice’, ‘Start!’ and ‘Beat Surrender’, slightly less bit hits ‘When
You’re Young’, ‘Eton Rifles’, ‘Down in the Tube Station At Midnight’, ‘David
Watts’ and ‘That’s Entertainment’ (which reached number 21 – on import) plus
their punk anthems ‘In The City’ and ‘The Modern World’ and the (relative) bomb
that was ‘News of the World’ thanks to its status as the theme tune of a
popular panel show I’m just gonna say “fuck it” and ignore all of their A-Sides
and Double A-Sides and make this an all album track and B-side affair, the sign
of a true fan! So are you sitting comfortably? Because for those of you
watching in black and white, this one is in Technicolour: